A Thanksgiving Rant that has Nothing to do with the Election!

It’s Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The pumpkin pies are in the oven, but my heart is aching for families in Tennessee who sent their precious little ones off to school only to have them wind up in hospital rooms or ICUs or morgues. My heart is hurting for all those families—including the bus driver and his family. Because even if the driver was speeding and/or driving recklessly, what happened isn’t his fault. It’s ours! All of our faults.

When I lived in Phoenix, my kids went to a school at the end of the block. They walked there and back. They didn’t have to ride school buses. And when I lived in Bisbee as a school girl, I walked to and from school as well. No buses there, either.

When I arrived in Seattle and lived in the Denny Regrade, I encountered the Seattle Public School District’s Voluntary Busing program. It was only voluntary in that the school district signed up for it voluntarily rather than being forced to comply with a court order, but it was not voluntary for kids or their parents. Your kid got on a bus and went wherever the school district said.

I believe in seat-belts. My kids wore seat-belts when they rode in my vehicle. They still do and would do so even without the Click it or Ticket jingles designed to remind us that not wearing a seatbelt is against the law. They wore seat-belts long before there were mandatory rules that said infants in car seat and children up to certain ages had to ride in the back seats of vehicles. (Driving with an infant crying inconsolably in the backseat is a teeth gnashing proposition sometimes, but those are the rules, and the rules save lives.)

So it was a big shock to me when I learned that when my kids got on buses to go from downtown Seattle to their new elementary school down in the Rainier Valley, that there were no seat-belts on the buses. I immediately went to see someone at the school district and expressed my concern. She sat behind her desk and told me with a perfectly straight face that seat-belts weren’t necessary because “our buses don’t go that fast.” Since the route traveled took the bus up and down the I-5 corridor in rush hour traffic, that was then (thirty years ago) and still is the God’s truth. After all, no one on I-5 can go fast during rush hour in ANY DIRECTION!

The problem is, it’s more than thirty years later and school buses STILL don’t have seat-belts. Or airbags. Or any of the other things that make people safer and are REQUIRED!!! in other vehicles, and I’m sitting here today wondering WHY THE HELL NOT???!!! The hauntingly nightmarish idea of having those poor little ones being smashed around and bounced off all those desperately hard surfaces makes me sick to my stomach.

Some of the possible reasons why school buses still don’t have seatbelts? For one thing, installing seatbelts would reduce the number of people who could be crammed into any given bus. Right. One seatbelt per passenger. That means, if you run out of seatbelts you run out of room. In that case, the district either needs to pony up for more buses or make additional trips.

It would be inordinately expensive. How inordinately expensive is it to lose a single child? And maybe that’s true—maybe the start up costs would be steep, but here’s an idea: Why not start a brand new American industry—retrofitting all the schoolbuses we have now with seatbelts. That single infrastructure safety correction should be worth several thousand household supporting jobs!

One article I read mentioned that kids might be injured by some bully kid riding on a bus and wielding a “heavy seatbelt buckle” as a weapon. That’s a potential problem—a possible one. But here’s a real one: Those kids in Tennessee have lost their lives or have been gravely injured because they were traveling in a bus without being belted in. As for that would be bully? Kids who misbehave on buses—including slamming other kids while using seatbelt buckles as weapons no longer get to ride on school buses. Period. Their transportation problems are suddenly their parental units’ transportation problems.

As citizens of this country we are required—by the government—to have and use seatbelts in our passenger vehicles. Shouldn’t branches of government—namely school districts—be required to do the same?

America is supposed to be government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and it’s high time we held someone’s feet to the fire.